Yes, you heard that right. The age old debate has finally been put to rest. For many years now, researchers have presented us with conflicting studies about whether women find bearded men more attractive or the clean-shaven ones. For every research that claims the smooth clean-cut look is more desirable among women, there are two counter studies claiming face fuzz is the way to go. But now, a US-based eCommerce website has finally A/B tested their way to the truth. Read on.. The Company AdonisClothing is a US-based eCommerce store exclusively dealing in men’s fashion. However, what sets them apart from other e-shops is that they don’t sell directly to men. Their target audience is women who shop for their boyfriends and spouses. Their website encourages women to shop for a ‘complete makeover of the guy’ and that’s one of the reasons their average order value is on a higher side at $90. Also, according…

Summary A major Dutch healthcare professionals’ association decided to a/b test a seemingly minor change in its header image. Using VWO, it discovered that the change – removing a horizontal line in the image, could lead to a substantial 7.8% increase in conversion rate, with almost 100 percent probability for consistent results. The Client VVAA, an association of over 75,000 Dutch healthcare professionals, specializes in providing quality advice to its members on areas ranging from setting up and managing a practice, to portfolio management and mortgages. As a market leader in the healthcare industry and a pioneer in the area of medical liability insurance, VVAA attracts a very healthy traffic to its site. Visitors are greeted with a fairly big header image containing a list of benefits and a CTA button. Things were good. Then, the VVAA corporate communication had a design idea. A horizontal line representing a “lifeline” was added right at…

The Company Bionic Gloves is an online store that designs and sells a range of gloves, such as golf gloves, fitness gloves, and more. Their focus is to provide customers with gloves that have fine grip, comfort, and durability. To increase sales from their eCommerce shop, they decided to optimize their website. The task was given to Portland-based marketing & conversion optimization agency, Sq1. The Test Sq1 performed many tests on the Bionic Gloves website. In this case study I’ll be taking you through an interesting test that was performed on one of the most important pages of any eCommerce website, the shopping cart page. In fact, one study by Surepayroll estimated that each year eCommerce websites lose a whopping $18 billion because of shopping cart abandonment. To test their hypothesis that removing the ‘special offer’ and ‘gift card’ code boxes from the shopping cart page would result in more…

I think I should make a series of all the A/B tests that I have personally come across in which removing a certain element worked for one company, and adding that same element worked for another. (To understand what I mean by element, you should read this post.) After all, every business is different. And so are their target audiences. Few months back, I came across this wonderful test in which an SEO company went from a content rich page to one with only a form and headline texts, and improved their conversions. I was intrigued, and curious to know the science behind why such pages work, and why even giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora have bare minimum homepages. I have added my findings about why they work, and what the challenges of such a page could be in the same post. Do give it a read. In fact,…

This is Part 2 of a 2-part blog post written by David Rosenfeld and Milad Oskouie on how colors can help increase your website’s conversions and revenue. Check out Part 1 here. David Rosenfeld is a director at Infinite Conversions, a conversion rate optimization agency. David spent five years working as a lawyer in Australia and London and three years as an associate in the Mergers and Acquisitions department of a global Investment Bank focusing on technology startups. David’s experience has included significant work on campaign specific conversion optimisation. David holds a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Software Engineering from the University of Sydney and an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Milad Oskouie is a former lawyer and current analyst at Infinite Conversions. Milad has a background in the law as well as in funds management and financial services. In Part 1, we talked…

P.S.(the pre-script one): Few days back I did a case study where adding the word “free” increased the button CTR for a company by 99.42%. And when I was looking at this test where a company eliminated the step involving “free”, they actually got a spike in their conversions. No, I am not surprised. A/B testing does question our instincts or what seems right. And a word of caution before I proceed — something that worked for one company, might or might not work for you. The Company EzLandlordForms is a typical example of business formed out of, “Solve a pain point. Even better, solve your own pain point!”. Kevin, the founder, was a landlord back in 2005 when he thought of eliminating the trouble he was facing in creating the perfect lease. He launched the website EzLandlordForms, and since 2006, he along with his team has helped more than…

The Company Who Accepts Amex is an affiliate model website based out of the UK. They list out companies which do and do not accept American Express. Their revenue comes from the commission earned from sales on other websites. Hence, every click on their website literally matters to them. To optimize their website and get more clicks (and hence more affiliate commission), they approached Lone Goat — a web analytic and Conversion Rate Optimization agency. Lone Goat began their task with the first step of analyzing data of “Who Accepts Amex” website. This was done to find the most suitable page to begin their optimization efforts. One of their major discoveries during data analysis was — the ‘companies’ page template of the website produced fewer external clicks per page compared to the ‘categories’ template despite having more page-views. Therefore, this page was chosen to perform the first optimization test. The…

UC Berkeley was once sued for bias against women applying to their graduate programs. Their fall admission figures showed a difference of 25% which couldn’t be just attributed to chance. They successfully defended against this charge with a drill down to department-level segmentation which proved that in fact women had a higher admission rate for most departments; it was just that majority of the female applicants had applied for competitive departments which already had a low admission rate for both genders hence skewing the overall data. Welcome to Simpson’s Paradox and how you can beat it using Post-Result Segmentation to find trends for a certain segment of traffic which could be buried under a mountain of data. Post Result Segmentation. Post Result Segmentation in VWO is an enterprise feature which lets you slice and dice your reports to smaller, specific and targeted segments. This lets you find out the most…

This is Part 1 of a 2-part blog post written by David Rosenfeld and Milad Oskouie on how colors can help increase your website’s conversions and revenue. David Rosenfeld is a director at Infinite Conversions, a conversion rate optimization agency. David spent five years working as a lawyer in Australia and London and three years as an associate in the Mergers and Acquisitions department of a global Investment Bank focusing on technology startups. David’s experience has included significant work on campaign specific conversion optimisation. David holds a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Software Engineering from the University of Sydney and an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Milad Oskouie is a former lawyer and current analyst at Infinite Conversions. Milad has a background in the law as well as in funds management and financial services. Most people can choose their favorite color if you ask…

The Company Established in 1976 primarily as a residential condominium management organization, Provident Hotels & Resorts quickly evolved into a pioneer of the Condominium Hotel Industry. By 1980, they had established one of the first “condo-hotel” properties on the Gulf Coast of Florida. You can reserve rooms in hotels, resorts and condos in Florida on their website providentresorts.com The Test To find out the most promising combination of form title and CTA button text, Sabre Hospitality Solutions Digital Marketing team — the agency hired by providentresorts.com to optimize their website — performed a multivariate test with VWO. Since the reservation console is visible on all their pages, the test was run sitewide by using *websitename.com* pattern to match all URLs. This is how it looks: And after clicking on the dates, the CTA appears which looks like this: The original title on the form, “Make a Reservation” was tested against…